https://medium.com/maxistentialism-blog/star-trek-deep-space-nine-in-82-5-hours-10acde591fd2A little bit about Star Trek
Deep Space Nine was born out of the politics of the Next Generation writers’ room, which writer Tracy Tormé described as “an insane asylum.”
Gene Roddenberry, the utopian visionary/despotic lunatic creator of Star Trek, established a set of strict rules about how people would behave in the future. Roddenberry said that in the 24th century, there would be no money because futuristic technology would provide for people’s material needs. There would be no smoking, no piracy, no religion, and no prejudice. After Roddenberry cast Patrick Stewart as the captain in Next Generation, a reporter joked, “Surely they would have cured baldness by the 24th century!” Roddenberry replied, “In the 24th century, they wouldn’t care.”
Roddenberry also decreed that among the enlightened members of the Federation, there would be no interpersonal conflict. He banned “stories in which our characters do something stupid or dangerous.” The Next Generation writers hated these rules, because, to put it lightly, conflict and danger are traditionally considered important components of a good story.
Next Generation writer Ronald D. Moore (who would go on to write for DS9 and create Battlestar Galactica) said, “It was a constant problem that we just sort of gnashed our teeth about. It never made any logical sense or any dramatic sense. And we were always bitching and moaning about it. And my personal theory was that Gene sort of started to believe in himself as more of a visionary than a writer at a certain point. He started to believe the stuff that he was creating a utopian future and wanted the Next Generation universe to be reflective of the utopian universe that so many people had told him he had been creating for all these years.”
Here’s an anecdote that I love, from Next Gen writer (and future DS9 showrunner) Ira Steven Behr:
I created this planet called Risa, which was a pleasure planet. The captain was stressed out and needed a vacation. He went on this vacation and there was a holosuite there — or a holodeck — I guess a holosuite, we called it.
It said, “Face Your Greatest Fear!” and it was like a carnival place. And he thought, “Oh, cool, this is going to put me in a good mood. What I need is to fight some Klingons without thinking about the repercussions of it, or go after some Romulans or whatever it is.
And he goes into this holodeck, and it was all about the captain being promoted to admiral, and losing the Enterprise, and Riker being bumped up to captain of the Enterprise. Basically, though we never really hit it on the head, it’s about growing old. Not to grow old, but your time of life changing and suddenly you’re not going to be the guy going off on adventures, you’re going to be sitting at a desk somewhere, SENDING people on adventures. That’s his greatest fear.
Then it became a whole long story that I’m not going to get into now, but it got SLAMMED dead by Gene [Roddenberry]; it was my big ‘Gene meeting’, where he slammed me down with all kind of pronouncements about what Star Trek is and is not. It was like, “Picard fears nothing. If it’s time for him to grow old, to become an admiral, he becomes an admiral! He would not think about that, AT ALL. Picard is John Wayne!” Well, John Wayne had all kinds of fears and guilt and angers and bitterness in his best movies… “No. John Wayne is a hero, Picard is a hero, we are not doing this episode.” Even though I guess this had happened a lot on the show in the first couple seasons, it hadn’t hit us.
And that’s when Gene sat there, “…but I love the pleasure planet! Get the captain laid!”
